


Latcho Drom, Chakano-Chey

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Circus Family, F/M, Family Feels, Family of Misfits and Miscreants, Fire, Inappropriate touching, Loss, M/M, Mentions of The Romani Holocaust, Multi, Polyamory, Racial slurs, Racism, Romani & Travelers, Romani Character, Romani Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 05:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17698133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: "Maggie May was an acrobat, a flyer, a stargazer, a dreamer, a child born of sadness who became the light of her parents lives.Bry May was a reactive-orphan, her feet firmly planted on the ground, eyes downcast, who studied the dust in the sky beyond the stars.The only thing both portions of her life had in common was the cherry red guitar laying on her bed. Unassuming and beautiful as the day she and her Dat had built the thing from bits and bobs around the Circus yard."(Well, Girl!Brian is Romani, an acrobat, a guitarist, a stargazer and eventually very much in love.)Title Translation: Safe Journey, Star-Girl/Star-Daughter.





	Latcho Drom, Chakano-Chey

**Author's Note:**

> A fair warning, this tiny one-shot makes absolutely zero sense. :D
> 
> This features both Romani and Circus/Carny Culture, both of which are very separate entities and simply happen to coexist in Girl!Brian's life. This has absolutely no bearing on the unfair stereotype that Romani are fortune-tellers or witches. It is a lovely culture and that they are both in this story is both timing and coincidence, nothing more. 
> 
> Also Day/Daj is mother and Dat is father.
> 
> The Tyger, Tyger quote is William Blake. 
> 
> :D

**“Devlesa araklam tume.”**

_**It is with God that we found you.** _

 

  
She was adopted by her parents as a newborn.

Her earliest memories were of her mother’s lullabies, crooned in _Romani čhib._

The beautiful lilting language of her birth.

Curled up in her warm arms, as Magda sang sweet as a songbird, kissing her daughter's scalp through her head of tempestuous dark curls. Poignant, that the first thing tiny Maggie knew was music. Butterfly fingers that held onto her dampened skin. The smell of cinnamon and peppermint that always surrounded her mother.

Those deceptively soft hands would soon teach her to stand on her own, to soothe her when she cried, brush away her tears, and do up the buttons on her pressed dresses. They would tighten the bands on her leotards, and teach her to knead bread dough, by wrapping those delicate fingers around her own small hands and walking her through the motions. _Push. Push. Fold. Push. Push. Fold. Sprinkle flour. Over and over again._ Until the dough was fluffy and elastic.

Magda was just a _girl_ back then, but to her daughter? She was so much more.

She was Maggie’s whole world.

 _“Day?”_  Maggie had asked, softly. Those tiny, flour-stained fingers tracing the blue-black bruised number on the inside of her mother’s arm. “What’s _this?”_

Magda, mother of Maggie, had stilled and looked down at her child with all the sadness in the world. _“Porraimos.” Porajmos. The Devouring._ It was all she would say on the matter, until Maggie was grown enough to know what that word meant. Why she’d been adopted in the first place.

Not so old sufferings.

The sorrowful tale that the world forgot.

  
***

  
Maggie was raised with loving hands, in the place her parents had run to after the dark shadows of their past. A place full of light and a different sort of devotion.

They found a home in the Circus. Yes, _the Circus._

Magdalena Bryony May, who was born into sadness, was reborn into light.

With sawdust in her veins and filling her mouth.

She'd nursed as a baby from a bottle of elephant's milk, was always far more comfortable hanging upside-down forty-feet in the air than standing forty-feet below it, and could walk on her hands before her feet. Her Mama was born to fly, her Daddy stuck his head in lions' mouths for a living.

A life of turmoil and strife became something beautiful.

Circus wasn't just a _place_ to her, it was how she was taught to live.

Even though she had never attended formal schooling as a girl, her childhood had been full of a different kind of education. She learned the acrobatics and aerial acts her mother adored, she learned about music, about the stars in the sky, how to take care of those she loved and provide for herself in a pinch.

She could tell it was going to rain by the smell in the air and cook just about anything, anywhere and anytime. She could sing songs, and speak basic phrases in every language that she’d been taught by other traveling groups and other members of her circus family as a child. Even make herbal brews and medications, poultices that could cure just about anything.

She was proud of her heritage and her family, she wasn’t ashamed of the way she grew up. She was only ashamed of her people’s treatment at the hands of others. _Carny or Romani_ , they were always treated horribly.

Catching a rock in the face was never excusable. Catching several on different occasions was worse, if commonplace. _“Dirty tramps! Dirty gypsies!”_

She remembered crying into her mother’s skirt, blood dripping sluggishly from her hairline, asking why people hated them so.

Magda never had an answer for her daughter.

She didn’t ask questions anymore, just learned how to be afraid.

  
***

  
The worst day of Maggie May’s life came with a soundtrack.

John Philip Sousa's _"Stars and Stripes Forever”._

The Circus Death March.

It could mean anything, a fire in the tent, a child-abduction, open gunfire, a menagerie malfunction, or even that an act took a nasty turn.

But it was a code, a signal for all the Circus family and the first one they ever learned, from the performers to the soda-pop venders.

Telling everyone to drop whatever the fuck they were doing, and get the audience _OUT._ The teenagers loitering at the phone-booth, the stressed parents with sticky toddlers, and those older kids munching on kettle-corn and cotton-candy with stars in their eyes, were first priority. They were always first priority. 

Circuses by nature were very dangerous places, it was not uncommon for something to go wrong every night. 

But usually the slip-ups were minor and didn't cost anything. Yet, everyone who worked and lived underneath _The Big Top_ , knew the risks. They knew that they put their lives in danger with every set-up and tear-down. It was accepted. Common knowledge. 

Maggie’s first cradle was forty-feet high, in trapeze rigging, so she knew it as well as any other.

_(When she was little, she'd watch her mother put on show make-up and sequined costumes in their rundown trailer. For the first six years of her life, she thought her Day was a princess. For the next nine, she knew she was a Queen)._

Maggie started bending her child-chubby body in curious ways, like taffy, before she was even old enough to toddle.

Her mother encouraged it.

The contortion training started before Maggie knew the proper word for it. She performed her first show while she was still in pull-ups. The acrobatics came later. While other children were learning how to take timed naps in preschool, Maggie May was hanging upside down on a swinging trapeze. She was _fearless_. She could reach up and touch the stars she loved so much. She could _fly._ Other children learned that they were fallible, by falling off their Big Wheels and skinning their knees on the jungle gym.

Maggie learned by breaking both her wrists after a particularly bad fall off the Russian swing.

Cracking a vertebrae in her neck after losing her balance on a tightrope.

She knew the fragility of life early on and it didn't involve the flushing of a treasured pet goldfish or the burying of a family cat. 

But Circus wasn't all _pain_. And it was the only life she ever knew. 

Her school was an old clown teaching her how to count with playing cards, and learning to read off of glossy show programs. She taught herself about the stars through encyclopedias and star charts, realizing that she wanted to study the night-sky when she was older. Her toys were training equipment and the stars were nestled in her soul. She would always have _the stars._

Her idea of fun was gazing above or getting a trunk full of soapy water blasted in her sunburned face, while helping to bathe the naughtiest of elephants. Or chasing her beloved mother around the campsite, roaring like a make-believe lion as she laughed, breathlessly.

It was a good life. A full and enriching life. 

She grew into that life. 

A gangly fifteen-year-old, so tall for a girl, spindly and slight, and overtly comfortable in her own skin. Complete with long demanding sable curls that sprung up from her head in every direction and coiled around her waist, she always had to tie them up while performing, lest they get snagged in the rigging. Her performance smile was big and her voice even bigger. She thought she knew everything, that she knew exactly where she needed to be.

She didn’t, _not really._

And it was all because of one night, on a seemingly routine show, when she heard the band frantically start playing _Stars and Stripes Forever._

She had no idea what the emergency was at the time, but she was moving on instinct and already had two unaccompanied children in her reedy arms and was bolting for the exit within the same breath. It was like being on autopilot. She could see everything that was happening, but her limbs were all working of their own accord. The fire spread so fast. It was as if she had blinked once or twice, a simple fleeting thing, and suddenly _The Big Top was aflame_. 

Everyone was rushing, running, tripping over one another. It was a panic-filled mess. But the band kept on playing. So she kept on grabbing patrons and shoving them through the tent flaps, into the bitter cold outside. She was still in costume then, a tight frilly sequined thing that reflected light like a beacon, magenta ribbons holding back her torrential hair, violet cresting eyeshadow framing her face. Her mother had been performing that night too, Maggie had seen her in the back, ready to go on. She couldn't see her anymore. It was a wonder that she could see anything at all. 

It was the middle of the night, but everything was so bright. 

_Burning. Burning._

_Everything was burning._

For some unknown reason, she thought of a poem. She'd only read it once, not that she recalled where or when exactly, she couldn't even remember who'd written it. All she knew was that it was old. _"Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night..." Songs of Innocence turning into Songs of Experience._ Childhood melting away to reveal what lurked beneath. 

She knew her mother was dead, long before she screamed for her. 

Searching for her face in the huge moving mass of hundreds. Even as she tried to run into the blaze, familiar hands held her back. Atticus, an old roustabout that had toted her around on his shoulders obligingly when she was just a tot. Glory, the gender-fluid young acrobat who performed with her sometimes, those hands had never ever dropped her. Not once. Yasha, the Russian strong-man who always spoke fondly of the " _Old Country"_ like he'd just stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, though no one could remember exactly when the old fool had joined up anyway. 

Her father, not her birth father, but the man who had raised her, built a guitar with her for her fifteenth birthday _(after realizing the connection she had with the music)_ , who had agreed to parent a child that wasn’t his own with all the love in his body, the Polish Roma menagerie man who went to school to study veterinary science and then _refused to let his daughter run after her mother._ He held her while she screamed.

Once the inferno had been suitably doused, every spare circus family member all but descended on that tent like a pack of rabid dogs. But not Maggie, she just sat on the dewy grass in a sharp and deep W, as if her legs had just refused to hold her up a moment longer. Her mother, her _Day_ , was dead. 

She already knew it. 

Even as sweet Posy, another acrobat, burst into deep hiccuping sobs beside her, holding her close. And Yasha pressed a little silver pendant into her glittery palm without saying a word. A little Eiffel Tower, covered in sticky flecks of soot. 

The authorities promised to uncover something, some remains to bury at least. 

But no one in the Circus said a single thing. For or against the idea. They all knew Magda, and they all knew that she had worn that necklace everyday, ever since she was a wan little girl with a white dress and big brown doe eyes, a number on her wrist, trying to find a home for her tiny family. She had once told Maggie that it reminded her of home, of Paris, of the place she'd been born. Finding that necklace was as good as finding her ashes. 

There were four human casualties reported. _One fatality._

Three suffering from smoke inhalation, but who would recover. _One fatality._

Two animal deaths, a pair of tigers. _One human fatality._

It wasn't a tragedy. Only one person died. Some circus performer with less than twenty dollars to her name and several overdue library books selected by her daughter, who sang horribly off-key and spoke in semi-broken English. The public was not outraged. These things happened. They never released her name. No one cared.

 _Circuses were dangerous places_ , they said. _Understandable,_ they said.

They didn't know that she had been one little girl's whole world, for as long as she could remember. The reason for the sun rising everyday. For snow being cold and water being wet.

And now she was _gone._  

Magdalena May stopped being _Maggie_ that day.

She pressed a kiss to the trapeze rigging that had once helped her to fly.

Hugged her father, the man who hadn’t made her, but who _had_ all the same.

Picked up her darling _Red Special_ and homemade maps of the stars, setting off like her mother once had.

When she eventually played in London, having scrapped the idea of going to Paris, she could close her eyes and think of being a little girl again, playing for her Circus family who would love her always, and could almost hear the sound of her mother's laughter again.

Maggie May died with sawdust in her veins, music in her heart and circus in her soul.

 

***

 

 _Maggie May_ was an acrobat, a flyer, a stargazer, a dreamer, a child born of sadness who became the light of her parents lives.

 _Bry May_ was a reactive-orphan, her feet firmly planted on the ground, eyes downcast, who studied the dust in the sky beyond the stars.

The only thing that both portions of her life had in common, was the cherry red guitar laying on her bed. Unassuming and still as beautiful as the day she and her Dat had built the thing, from bits and bobs found around the Circus yard.

Even the girl in the mirror looked  _wrong._

Maggie May’s eyes had always been alight with such joy.

Bry never laughed the way she used to, never smiled the same way, as if untouched by the sadness of the generations before her. Her hair fell _into_ her face instead of framing it, turned into more of a nuisance than a source of pride.

But she couldn’t bear the idea of cutting it, she tugged on the ends of the bouncy curls viciously instead, tears burned in her eyes.

She couldn’t cut it all off, not when it was the last thing that reminded her of her mother. All those years of sitting in her mother’s lap, as she dutifully tended to the mess on her child's head, combing her fingers through any tangles and moisturizing the ends.

_“You have the most beautiful Roma curls, Chakano-Chey.” Star-daughter._

_Star-girl._

The loss of her mother never got any easier to bear.

Bry lost the girl who used to be Maggie. 

It didn’t matter that she was doing everything she had always wanted  _(studying the night-sky, living in the city)._ Her heart wasn’t in it anymore.

Not until Tim, a boy with shaggy hair and soft eyes that she’d met at school, saw more than just a smart girl with empty eyes when he looked at her, and they started playing music together. He was a bassist and a singer, and he saw the homemade guitar that she treated like her own child, and listened to her play.

He had been delighted, won over in an instant. “ _We can be a band, Bry! We just have to find a drummer.”_

And so find a drummer they did.

An angry little blond gremlin, who apparently didn’t realize that his curly-haired guitarist was a _girl,_ until he walked in on her in the shower... fully aware that she was _in the shower_ and that it was _in use_ , to grab a bar of soap  _(how he got into her flat, she would never know)._

“Hey Bry, I need some soap can I—?”

He was eye-level with her naked and wet, well… _attributes_ , before flicking up to her face, pure soggy curls and horrified eyes.

It should have been counted as a testament to _her_ character, that she didn’t scream and attempt to bludgeon him to death with a nearby loofah on a stick, and a testament to _his_ character, that Roger merely screamed in his sky-high falsetto and fainted, dragging the shower curtain down with him.

  
***

  
Of all the ways Bry had imagined her life playing out, being a guitarist in a rock band wasn’t one of them.

It didn’t even feel that way at first. It was just one disappointment after another.

They lost Tim.

Tim who had hugged her with a stronger grip than she’d ever thought him capable of. “Take care of yourself, Bryony.”

It was the first and last time he ever called her that. The last time he ever called her _anything._

But then they found _Freddie._

Freddie who had taken one look at her and called her _‘the clever one’_ … not _‘the pretty one’_ or ‘ _the girl’._ But clever, smart, brilliant in her own right. “You’re studying Astrophysics aren’t you? That makes you _the clever one.”_

She'd held her head up high, looked at him dead-on and said. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

When Roger made a crack about his teeth, she was sorely tempted to shove the blond, out of the van with a white clogged foot. Instantly feeling responsible for the blond’s antics. After all their years together, she had become just as at home with Roger, as she’d once been as a young girl, high up in aerial silk.

Then there was _John_ who had entered their lives in a flurry of movement.

Their _Deaky,_ who was as brilliant as he was quiet at first. _Quiet. Not shy_. Because once he opened up, he was like a passion flower in bloom. Bry thought she’d met the _smartest person in the world._  He who looked at her like the equal she was. _Equal in guitar, equal in song-writing prowess, and equal in mind._

Then she watched as tiny, calm, cool and collected John, who tempered Roger’s fire and Freddie’s scathing wit, as well as her own callous and selfish tendencies...

Buried his fist in the face of some sorry bloke at a pub-show, who’d thought it a prudent time to cop-a-feel as she exited the risers. She’d been aghast, shocked, and the meaty bloke ripped the delicate chain off her body, her mother’s necklace was lost in the throng and she felt _sick._

Grabbing onto Freddie and Roger, as they were the closest to her, and dragging them all out, lest they join in the scuffle.

She was livid, when John finally raced out to join them. His bass guitar slung neatly over his back and her Old Lady in one hand. She felt a rush of relief at the sight of her guitar, but still reeled on him in an instant.

 _“John Richard Deacon!_ I don’t need you to fight my battles for me! And I certainly don’t need you getting hurt because of some arsehole in a pub got  _a little handsy!”_

She felt disgusted by what had just happened, but the blood on the young bassist’s face made her feel even worse.

“You didn’t hear what he called you!” Deaky screeched back, blood dripping stubbornly into one of his eyes, _Deaky, their Deaky_ who had never shouted at them before. _Never._

He was right, she hadn’t. The pub had been so loud and she’d been shocked at just the contact.

“What did he say?” It was Rog who asked, quiet for once as he wrapped his arms around Bry’s waist, tethering her.

John just shook his head. “I won’t say it.” His voice even wavered.

Freddie asked as well and so did she, before John finally said it, barely audible, as his eyes never left the floor.

“He called Bry _‘our gypo whore’.”_

 _Fuck. That was bad._ She’d been called worse of course. But it was still probably a shock to John. To all her bandmates, who she had quickly come to regard as her new family. The bandmates who let out various indignant cries and threats of murder in her defense. 

“Which doesn’t even make sense! Because Bry isn’t a gyp…” John continued, until he saw the way her face fell. _“Oh.”_

She turned away from them automatically, her hands flying to her curls. “I should just cut them off.” She hadn’t even realized that she’d spoken aloud until Freddie was there, delicately extricating her hands from where they were fisted tightly in her hair.

“If you cut off your hair, I’ll get my teeth fixed, lose my vocal range and we’ll all be screwed.” His eyes wet, but his bright smile still on display. Bry pretended that she couldn’t see the tears in Freddie’s eyes. “So you’d better keep them, dove.”

“Fred…” Her voice broke halfway through.

She wanted to talk about all the years of hatred. Of people refusing to let her rent out books from small-town libraries, of rocks thrown in her face, of having no one but her Circus family of misfits to turn to. And how _of course_ , she had found a new family of misfits and miscreants to call her own, the second time around.

“You’re the prettiest gypsy ever, _Brianna May.”_

Rog mumbled into her back, being too short to reach much higher and she rolled her eyes fondly. “It’s Romani or Roma or Rom. Calling me a ‘ _gypsy_ ’ is like calling Fred a _‘paki’._ ” She shot the dark-haired boy a gentle and _apologetic_ smile at the comparison. “He’s not from Pakistan and I’m not from Egypt. Besides, Bry isn’t short for Brianna. It’s short for _Bryony_.”

An ugly, green, English vine.

Roger crawled around her, not letting go of her middle, until they were front to front, his head pillowed on her soft chest, and she rolled her eyes, for what had to be the ninth time in that hour alone. “Your first name is _Bryony?”_

“No,” She corrected. “My first name is _Magdalena_ , my middle name is Bryony.”

“Oh.” It was John’s turn to have his doe eyes widen, and he reached into his pocket to grab something. “Is that what the _Magda_ means? I figured you’d want this back.”

“No, my parents called me _Maggie_. _Magda_ was my mother.” Bry answered on autopilot. 

The silver tower was dangling delicately between John’s calloused fingers.

It took him a moment to catch up to the _tense_ of the sentence, but once he did... _sympathy_ bloomed in his eyes.

“Shit, I’m so sorry, Bry. _This is important then?”_ He held it out to her and she surged forwards with a wet smile, eyes unconsciously filling with tears. Before she knew what she was doing, she had her lips planted firmly on John’s, having to duck her head a wee bit to do so.

She pulled away with wide eyes and a breathless laugh. “Deaky, that was… _I…”_

But he just slowly, tentatively, wrapped his own arms around her waist. “A simple _thank you_ would have sufficed, Bry.”

She flushed an unattractive scarlet, as Freddie joined in the three-way hug. “I think you mean _Maggie_.” Freddie corrected into her neck.

_“Our Maggie May.”_

She was no one’s _anything. Not a possession or a prize._

But in that moment, with her Freddie, her Deaky, and her Roger by her side… she wholeheartedly loved being _their Maggie May._

And for the first time in a lifetime, _Maggie_ smiled.

 

**“Putrav lesko drom angle leste te na inkrav les mai but palpale mura brigasa.”**

_**I open his way in the new life again and release him from the fetters of my sorrow.** _

_**(Ritual phrase to mark the end of mourning).** _

 


End file.
